There's Finally an Answer to Which Diet Burns the Most Fat

When someone goes on a diet, they usually choose between eliminating fat or carbs. Then they wait in agony for a few months hoping that the path they chose is the right one to help them drop a few clothing sizes. Now it seems the guesswork could be over. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health has concluded that a low-fat diet is the way to go if you want to get rid of the most fat. However, a low-carb diet does lower insulin levels and actually burns more fat.

Confusing, we know. Here's a breakdown: Since 2003, Kevin Hall, a metabolism researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, has been studying how the body responds to two specific diets: one in which 30 percent of calories were cut by eliminating carbohydrates while keeping fat intake the same and another where the situation was exact opposite. In order to make the study as accurate as possible, Hall confined 19 people (with their consent) in a metabolic ward for two weeks. Researchers meticulously controlled everything they ate. Hall found that the diet with reduced fat resulted in greater overall body-fat loss, despite the fact that the mirror-image diet with fewer carbs burned more fat. To come to this conclusion, the researchers measured how much fat each study participant had eaten and burned on each diet, then used the results to calculate the participants' rate of body-fat loss.

Hall also concluded that, over time, the body seems to reduce the differences between a low-fat and a low-carb diet. Nevertheless, his study suggests which kind of meal plan to pick when you're just starting to diet: low fat. "There is one set of beliefs that says all calories are exactly equal when it comes to body-fat loss, and there's another that says carbohydrate calories are particularly fattening, so cutting those should lead to more fat loss," Hall writes in the journal Cell Metabolism. "Our results showed that, actually, not all calories are created equal when it comes to body-fat loss, but over the long term, it's pretty close."